Virtual Price Wars of the Amazon Marketplace Bots
Sehr amüsante Anekdote von Carlos Bueno über Amazon-Bots, die sich Preiskämpfe um virtuelle Bücher aus Wikipedia-Artikeln über Alan Turing liefern.
Before I talk about my own troubles, let me tell you about another book, “Computer Game Bot Turing Test”. It’s one of over 100,000 “books” “written” by a Markov chain running over random Wikipedia articles, bundled up and sold online for a ridiculous price. The publisher, Betascript, is notorious for this kind of thing.
It gets better. There are whole species of other bots that infest the Amazon Marketplace, pretending to have used copies of books, fighting epic price wars no one ever sees. So with “Turing Test” we have a delightful futuristic absurdity: a computer program, pretending to be human, hawking a book about computers pretending to be human, while other computer programs pretend to have used copies of it. A book that was never actually written, much less printed and read.
The internet has everything.
New York Times about Google X
Die New York Times hat einen Artikel über Google X, ihr (jetzt nicht mehr so) supergeheimes Labor für künstliche Intelligenz und Robotik, wo sie an selbstfahrenden Autos basteln (die hatten sie im Frühjahr bereits vorgestellt, hier ein Clip einer Testfahrt, hier eine Präsentation vom Oktober), am Web of Things (vernetzte Kühlschränke und Glühbirnen und sowas) und an einem Space-Elevator bauen.
One Google engineer familiar with Google X said it was run as mysteriously as the C.I.A. — with two offices, a nondescript one for logistics, on the company’s Mountain View campus, and one for robots, in a secret location.
While software engineers toil away elsewhere at Google, the lab is filled with roboticists and electrical engineers. They have been hired from Microsoft, Nokia Labs, Stanford, M.I.T., Carnegie Mellon and New York University.
A leader at Google X is Sebastian Thrun, one of the world’s top robotics and artificial intelligence experts, who teaches computer science at Stanford and invented the world’s first driverless car. Also at the lab is Andrew Ng, another Stanford professor, who specializes in applying neuroscience to artificial intelligence to teach robots and machines to operate like people.
Johnny Chung Lee, a specialist in human-computer interaction, came to Google X from Microsoft this year after helping develop Microsoft’s Kinect, the video game player that responds to human movement and voice. At Google X, where he is working on the Web of things, according to people familiar with his role, he has the mysterious title of rapid evaluator.
At Google X, a Top-Secret Lab Dreaming Up the Future, mehr: Paris Lemon X (via Hacker News)
Siri meets Eliza
Spieleentwickler Jordan Mechner (Karateka, Prince of Persia) hat Apples Siri mit dem 45 Jahre alten Sprachprogramm Eliza von Joseph Weizenbaum reden lassen. Leider nicht ganz so absurd, wie andere Chatbot 2 Chatbot-Konversationen, dafür aber der erste (?), der den Chatbot-Quatsch mit Siri gemacht hat.
ELIZA: Hello, I am Eliza.
SIRI: Hi.
ELIZA: How are you today? What would you like to discuss?
SIRI: I’m fine. Thanks for asking.
ELIZA: How long have you been fine. Thanks for asking?
SIRI: Hmm… Let me think…
ELIZA: Do you doubt you?
Siri Meets Eliza (via Hacker News)
Vorher auf Nerdcore:
Chatbot2Chatbot-Konversation wird philosophisch
Chatbots discuss Chomsky & Foucault
Chatbots talks to Chatbot, becomes self-aware as a unicorn
Interview with the Chatbot2Chatbot-Creators
Iris 9000 Controller for Siri
(Youtube Direktiris, via Gizmodo)
ThinkGeek bringt nächstes Jahr einen Controller für Apples Spracherkennungs-AI-Digital-Assistant-Dings Siri raus. Das Teil heisst Iris 9000 und sieht aus, wie die Schwester von HAL. Jetzt muss ich mir ja doch wieder ein iPhone zulegen, damn!
Having an artificially intelligent computer at our beck and call has long been the fantasy of every green blooded sci-fi fan amongst us. Finally Siri on the iPhone 4s has given us a tantalizing taste of this promised future… and we’re lapping it up.
However it’s not all roses in our 2011 A.I. future tech fantasy. Sure Siri can schedule appointments, make funny quips and answer inane trivia questions with the help of Wolfram Alpha but she has one failing… to get her to listen you’ve got to have your hands on your phone and push a button. Somehow when we imagined the future of smart computer companions we assumed that shouting at them from across the room to do our bidding was part of the package. Apparently not.
Therefore you can see why we were forced to create the Iris 9000 voice control module for iPhone & Siri. Simply place your iPhone into the Iris 9000 cradle and use the included micro remote to trigger Siri up to 50 feet away. Just tap the Iris 9000 remote button once, listen for the Siri chime, and speak your command. The built in mic on the Iris 9000 picks up your voice from across the room and the embedded speaker amplifies Siri’s spoken responses. You can also make and receive calls using the Iris 9000 like a standard speakerphone. Oh and did we mention that Iris 9000′s glowing eye flickers along with Siri’s voice? How’s that for amazing Buckaroo Banzai future tech?
R.I.P. John McCarthy
John McCarthy, Erfinder der Programmiersprache Lisp und des Begriffs „Artifficial Intelligence“ verstarb gestern nacht im Alter von 84 Jahren. Von Wired:
John McCarthy died on Monday at the age of 84, according to Stanford University, where he served on the faculty for almost four decades. In organizing the Dartmouth Summer Research Conference on Artificial Intelligence in 1956, McCarthy not only added a term to the popular lexicon, he founded an entirely new area of research alongside fellow pioneers Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester, and Claude Shannon. In the years to come, he would go on invent LISP — one of the world’s most influential programming languages — and he played a major role in the development of time-sharing systems.
“Without time-sharing, you wouldn’t have the modern internet,” says Lester Earnest, who worked with McCarthy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the late fifties and later at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab (SAIL), the research operation McCarthy helped found in 1962.
But for all his influence over today’s world, McCarthy envisioned something much greater. Says Google’s Sebastian Thrun, who revived SAIL in 2003 before joining Google to build the company’s self-driving cars: “When it came to artificial intelligence, he was a philosopher.”
John McCarthy — Father of AI and Lisp — Dies at 84 (via Clockworker)
Shit that Siri says…
Schöne Galerie mit „bizarre items the AI-powered / voice-recognizing ‘intelligent assistant’ lays on you on the new iPhone 4S“, gibt’s auch als Tumblelog: Shit that Siri says… (via +Daniel)
Interview with the Chatbot2Chatbot-Creators
Kevin Kelly hat ein (sehr) kurzes Interview mit den Studenten, die neulich zwei Chatbots miteinander reden ließen und die sofort anfingen, über Gott und Einhörner zu reden und sich gegenseitig als Lügner zu bezeichnen.
There are a lot of other chatbots, but we heard good things about Cleverbot because its database is based on snippets that humans actually write and say. So we feed the output of one Cleverbot to the input of another. Then we feed the text log into Acapella, a free text-to-speach synthesizer. Then we animated the soundtrack using Living Actor Presenter. We don’t think we are the first to have two bots chat, but it seems we are the first to animate it. In retrospect that seems such an obvious thing to do.”
I asked them how long they had to run the conversation before they got the amazing dialog they animated.
“Actually, this conversation is the very first thing the duo created. In fact, we ran it longer but it never was quiet as good, not so varied, or strange. We got it going the very first time at 3am one morning, and we weren’t really prepared to start recording it, but luckily it automatically saved to a log, so we could retrieve this initial dialog. Our next step is to let run for a day or so and see what happens, see if certain topics recur. We have no idea what they will say.”
What about all the talk about God? And why are the bots so quick to call the other a liar?
“We think this is because the database of replies in Cleverbot is compiled from the questions and responses of human users, and apparently, humans will often accuse the bots of lying, or will query the bots about their origins, so when they start talking to each other, they mimic what humans say to them.”
Our bots ask theological questions because we do. So far, our bots are made in the image of their creators.
Theological Chatbots (via Boing Boing)
Vorher auf Nerdcore:
Chatbot2Chatbot-Konversation wird philosophisch
Chatbots discuss Chomsky & Foucault
Chatbots talks to Chatbot, becomes self-aware as a unicorn
Chatbots talks to Chatbot, becomes self-aware as a unicorn
(Youtube Direktunicorn, via IEEE)
Die Leute vom Cornell’s Creative Machines Lab haben in einem Experiment zwei Chatbots miteinander reden lassen. Das Ergebnis ist jetzt nicht so spannend, wie die, die ich hier schonmal hatte (Diskussionen um Philosophie, Chomsky und Foucault), aber dafür wird einer zum Einhorn. Ist ja auch was. Außerdem könnte ich da stundenlang zuschauen, wenn zwei AIs miteinander reden. Gibt’s für solche Unterhaltungen irgendwo ein Archiv? (Ernstgemeinte Frage.)
Vorher auf Nerdcore:
Chatbot2Chatbot-Konversation wird philosophisch
Chatbots discuss Chomsky & Foucault
Bookmarks for July 15th: Astronaut-Training, Half-Life, Donkey Kong, British Wrestling Posters
HALF-LIFE – Singularity Collapse – YouTube
GHOSTRIDERS II on Vimeo
Welcome to Titusville on Vimeo: Welcome to Titusville shows the impact of the 30 year Space Shuttle program on the residents of Titusville, a city that lies only a few miles from Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
2D Photography Rube Goldberg – YouTube
Leica Lenses (English) on Vimeo: Every Leica lens is hand-crafted and goes through meticulous manufacturing processes to uphold the quality and precision that Leica defines and customers have come to expect.
How It’s Made: The Impossible Project – YouTube: How It's Made takes us through how The Impossible Project manufactures its Instant Film for Polaroid cameras.
John Lasseter – A Day in a Life – Full Length Documentary – YouTube
Silverback Gorilla turns cameraman at Durrell – YouTube: Ya Kwanza the conservation Trusts 27 year old silverback gorilla became adept at snapping close ups of himself with a high definition camera which was encased in an indestructible box and covered with tasty honey and oats.
Let’s take back the Internet! – YouTube: In this powerful talk from TEDGlobal, Rebecca MacKinnon describes the expanding struggle for freedom and control in cyberspace, and asks: How do we design the next phase of the Internet with accountability and freedom at its core, rather than control? She believes the internet is headed for a "Magna Charta" moment when citizens around the world demand that their governments protect free speech and their right to connection.
Online Schools | State of the Internet 2011: Like any classic hero, the Internet grew from humble beginnings as a tiny speck to become the legend that it is today. The very first “instant message” wasn’t even a whole word before it broke the entire system, but it sparked a fantastic fire of possibilities. Now, we can IM friends from our phones while we browse Facebook and send a few tweets about our indigestion from last night’s cheesesteak, perhaps while taking care of that indigestion. We can email our friends in Paris and Tokyo from the MoMA and even send photos to Mom and Dad, too.<br />
Thirty-something years ago, this was stuff for sci-fi nerds.
NASA’s Glorious History of Training Astronauts | Wired Science | Wired.com
Space Shuttle Discovery – 360VR Images
Computer teaches itself English so that it can play Civilization
David Byrne’s 1987 Predictions for the Computers of 2007: I don't think computers will have any important effect on the arts in 2007. When it comes to the arts they're just big or small adding machines. And if they can't "think," that's all they'll ever be. They may help creative people with their bookkeeping, but they won't help in the creative process.<br />
The video revolution, however, will have some real impact on the arts in the next 20 years. It already has. Because people's attention spans are getting shorter, more fiction and drama will be done by television, a perfect medium for them. But I don't think anything will be wiped out; books will always be there; everything will find its place.
The Secret History of Donkey Kong: Donkey Kong is perhaps the greatest outsider game of all time. It broke all the rules because its creator, the now-legendary Shigeru Miyamoto, didn't know them to begin with. It not only launched the career of gaming's most celebrated creative mind, it gave birth to the jump-and-run platform genre as we know it, and established Nintendo as perhaps the industry's longest standing superpower.
british wrestling posters – a set on Flickr
PAS House – A House made for Skating: Imagine a city of the future where skateboards are used as the primary form of transportation and recreation – in and out of your home. A utopia city for skateboarders would mean that a skateable path, like a ribbon connecting everything together, links each building in an unending ability to keep in motion on your board. The PAS House takes this concept and brings it to life through an architectural project mixing a modern single family home with a skateboard ramp structure – all from an environmentally-driven perspective.
The Humor Code: Deconstructing the Science of Funny | Underwire | Wired.com
Tweet to Metal « PRINTERESTING: Last week, to mark the 125th anniversary of the linotype machine, Portland’s Stumptown Printers (with the help of some friends at the C.C. Stern Type Foundry) celebrated with a twitter-based letterpress project.
6 Ways to Bring Civility Online | The Art of Manliness: 1. Remember that there are real people on the other side of the computer. 2. Never say something to someone online that you wouldn’t say to the person’s face. 3. Use your real name. 4. Sit on it. 5. Or don’t respond at all. 6. Say something positive.
Bookmarks for Juli 4th: Downhill Skateboarding, Stickers, Portal 2 Cosplay
YouTube – Downhill Skateboarding: 2011 Santa Barbara Slide Jam
Terrific documentary on Rough Trade Records
Kutiman by Kutiman on SoundCloud: „my first album from 2007“
After Earth: Why, Where, How, and When We Might Leave Our Home Planet | Popular Science: Humanity may have millennia to find a new home in the universe–or just a few years
All kinds of stickers! – a set on Flickr: Bumper stickers, Hallmark stickers, promo stickers of all kinds. Mostly vintage stuff from the 70's and 80's, though I have a fair selection that's more recent.
Awesome Portal 2 Cosplay
3D display using a kinect – Hack a Day
How To Make a Tornado of Fire Out of Household Items
WARBIRDS OF MARS by Doc and Kane: A thrilling, neo-pulp/noir SciFi Webcomic
Hobo Lobo of Hamelin: A wonderfully crafted and designed illustrated book for the digital age.
TARDIS: Time and Relative Dimension in Soap
Springfield Punx: Doctor Who (Tennant) Wallpaper
atelier ted noten: lady killer vol. 1 for laikingland: poking a sturdy robotic finger in the face of conformity is 'lady killer vol.1', an unconventional jewelry box by atelier ted notenin collaboration with laikingland.
John Houck | iGNANT: Mittels selbst geschriebener Software generiert John Houck die höchst mögliche Anzahl an Kombinationen eines rasterförmigen Musters und druckt dies als Kontaktabzug auf Fotopapier. Dem Moment des mathematischen Konstruierens folgt der physische Eingriff. Immer und immer wieder werden dem Blatt Falten zugefügt, um es dann abzufotografieren, zu falten, abzufotografieren. Als Resultat offenbart sich der deutliche Verweis zu den Grundlagen der digitalen Fotografie: Eine von Fehlern durchsetzte Rastergrafik.
Norvig vs. Chomsky and the Fight for the Future of AI | Tor.com: Recently, Peter Norvig, Google’s Director of Research and co-author of the most popular artificial intelligence textbook in the world, wrote a webpage extensively criticizing Noam Chomsky. Their disagreement points to a revolution in artificial intelligence that, like many revolutions, threatens to destroy as much as it improves. Chomsky, one of the old guard, wishes for an elegant theory of intelligence and language that looks past human fallibility to try to see simple structure underneath. Norvig, meanwhile, represents the new philosophy: truth by statistics, and simplicity be damned. Disillusioned with simple models, or even Chomsky’s relatively complex models, Norvig has of late been arguing that with enough data, attempting to fit any simple model at all is pointless. The disagreement between the two men points to how the rise of the Internet poses the same challenge to artificial intelligence that it has to human intelligence: why learn anything when you can look it up?
Alan Turing-Statue passes Dogs Turing-Test
(Youtube Direktturing, via BBSubmitterator)
Ihr habt vielleicht dieses Video bereits gesehen, in dem ein Hund mit einer Statue Stöckchen spielen will. Fand ich nett. Der Knaller: Diese Statue ist das Alan Turing Memorial von Glyn Hughes im Sackville Park, Manchester (rechte Sidebar) und das hier ist quasi ein Turing-Test mit Hund. Grandios. Alan Turing war Code-Knacker der Enigma-Maschine, Erfinder der Turing-Tests und massgeblich an der frühen Entwicklung künstlicher Intelligenz beteiligt.
Vorher auf Nerdcore:
Britische Regierung entschuldigt sich bei Alan Turing
Schizophrenic Computer-Networks
Superinteressantes Experiment an den Unis in Austin, Texas und Yale. Dort haben Forscher Netzwerke, die normalerweise Gehirnfunktionen abbilden und Sprachen lernen, mit Informationen und Storys bombardiert, woraufhin diese als Ergebnis Symptome von Schizophrenie zeigten. Von PopSci: „Researchers testing mental illness figured out how to induce schizophrenic symptoms in a computer, causing it to place itself at the center of crazy delusions, such as claiming responsibility for a terrorist bombing. The results bolster a hypothesis that claims faulty information processing can lead to schizophrenic symptoms.“
Computer networks that can’t forget fast enough can show symptoms of a kind of virtual schizophrenia, giving researchers further clues to the inner workings of schizophrenic brains, researchers at The University of Texas at Austin and Yale University have found. The researchers used a virtual computer model, or “neural network,” to simulate the excessive release of dopamine in the brain. They found that the network recalled memories in a distinctly schizophrenic-like fashion. […]
“The hypothesis is that dopamine encodes the importance — the salience — of experience,” says Uli Grasemann, a graduate student in the Department of Computer Science at The University of Texas at Austin. “When there’s too much dopamine, it leads to exaggerated salience, and the brain ends up learning from things that it shouldn’t be learning from.” The results bolster a hypothesis known in schizophrenia circles as the hyperlearning hypothesis, which posits that people suffering from schizophrenia have brains that lose the ability to forget or ignore as much as they normally would. […]
“It’s an important mechanism to be able to ignore things,” says Grasemann. “What we found is that if you crank up the learning rate in DISCERN high enough, it produces language abnormalities that suggest schizophrenia.” After being re-trained with the elevated learning rate, DISCERN began putting itself at the center of fantastical, delusional stories that incorporated elements from other stories it had been told to recall. In one answer, for instance, DISCERN claimed responsibility for a terrorist bombing.
Scientists afflict computers with schizophrenia to better understand the human brain (via /.)
Designing the Face of Supercomputer Watson
(Youtube Direktwatson, via Coudal)
Gestern ging die dritte Runde Jeopardy! zu Ende und Watson hat seine menschlichen Gegner erwartungsgemäß haushoch geschlagen. Oben ein superinteressantes Video über den Designprozess von Joshua Davis und die Erschaffung von Watsons Stimme, hier ein Artikel dazu: Joshua Davis Creates the Face of Watson, IBM’s Jeopardy Supercomputer.
Nach dem Klick noch die Videos von gestern Abend und ein Interview mit Noam Chomsky über Watson, der den ganzen Kram in die richtige Perspektive rückt.
Supercomputer Watson vs Humans Round 1 (UPDATE: Round 2 online)
(Youtube Direktwatson, via Geekosystem)
[update] Video zu Tag 2 nach dem Klick.
Gestern ging die erste Runde im Jeopardy!-Kampf von IBMs Supercomputer gegen die Menschheit in die erste Runde. Hatte er in einer Aufwärm-Folge noch haushoch gewonnen, stand es gestern beim Ende der Sendung unentschieden zwischen Watson und Brad Rutter, die beide bei 5000$ standen. Ken Jennings landete relativ abgeschlagen bei 2000$.
Die Folge ist komplett bei Youtube und es ist superfaszinierend zu sehen, wo die zwar fantastische und erstaunlich gut funktionierende Technologie von Watsons Spracherkennung ihre Schwierigkeiten hat, Snip von Geekosystem:
Wordplay, partly. In response to the clue, “Stylish elegance, or students who all graduated the same year,” Watson answered fairly confidently with “chic.” (The correct answer was “class.”)
And then, there were the times when Watson’s lack of humanity caused it to make mistakes that the worst human Jeopardy! bungler wouldn’t: One particularly odd exchange happened when Ken Jennings incorrectly answered a decades question with the ’20s, and Watson immediately followed by responding, “What are the 1920s.” Trebek, with exasperation: “No, Ken said that.”
Dennoch: Genau diese kleinen Fehler erinnern einen daran, dass das hier ein echtes Rechnersystem mit Spracherkennung ist und kein Mann in einem Stahlkasten mit Wikipedia und Internet. Die zweite von drei Runden folgt heute abend (bei uns also morgen früh irgendwann), ich halt’ Euch auf dem Laufenden. Zweiter Clip der Sendung und ein Video über die Aktion von PBS nach dem Klick.
